مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The number and value of M&A deals in the banking industry have accelerated over the past decade in line with other industries (Beccalli & Frantz, 2013). Several factors have contributed to this including technological advancement, globalization of financial markets, deregulation, and intensified supervision. The global crisis in 2008 saw a sharp decline in the number of deals but the market regained its momentum in 2010 and has continued upwards since then, reaching 40,400 deals worth $3.5 trillion in 2014 (Swaminathan, Groening, Mittal, & Thomaz, 2014). In the US banking industry, there were 1112 deals in 2014, valued at $81.5 billion (Thomson Reuters, 2014).

The predominant motive for M&As is to enhance firm performance through the realization of cost and revenue efficiencies (Capron, 1999; Martynova & Renneboog, 2008). Cost efficiency may be achieved through asset disposals and redeployment of assets and capabilities by the combined firms. Revenue efficiency is the possibility of the merged firms generating additional revenue by exploiting complementary assets and capabilities (Barney, 1991; Capron, 1999). Whether such effi- ciencies are actually realized post-merger is an empirical question that has received extensive research attention from several disciplines, with most from scholars in finance and accounting, and least from researchers in marketing (e.g. Bahadir, Bharadwaj, & Srivastava, 2008; Homburg & Bucerius, 2005).

Only a handful of studies have investigated post-merger marketing performance and nearly all of these have employed just a single measure, either market share or sales revenue (e.g. Ghosh, 2004; Gugler, Mueller, Yurtoglu, & Zulehner, 2003; Mueller, 1985). These variables only capture marketing outputs while ignoring marketing inputs such as advertising and distribution costs. To the best of our knowledge, no study has taken a holistic view of marketing activities and examined the effect of M&As on the marketing efficiency of the merged firms by incorporating both marketing input and output variables.